Poster

Precision Medicine: Legal and Ethical Challenges

Precision medicine promises to revolutionize disease treatment and prevention by capitalizing on personal variation in factors including an individual's genes, environment and lifestyle. Genomic and molecular data, for example, can be used to determine predispositions to particular diseases, predict the efficacy and safety of different treatment options, and develop drugs that are targeted to the fundamental biology of diseases rather than their clinical manifestations. In these and other ways, scientific and technological advances have the potential to bring about an unprecedented tailoring of medical treatment and health care to the individual characteristics of patients. In order to realize the full potential of precision medicine, however, we must rethink components of the legal and ethical foundation on which it will be built. The reason for this is that science is more fluid than the law and ethics with which we hope to shape its development, and our legal and ethical frameworks were built with a very different generation of medical products and practices in mind. To identify and explore the answers to the challenges that arise from this gap, the worldâs experts on these matters will convene at the University of Hong Kong on 7-8 April 2016.

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